The reason that Microsoft suggested that they bundle competing products with Windows is that Microsoft knows that there is more to winning the streaming media contest than simply having your software installed.
Right now, as we speak, Microsoft is busing lining up all of the large content providers and selling them on using Windows Media Player as the the new distribution medium for their content. Hollywood and her allies are dying for a way that they can use the Internet to distribute their media, but up until recently there wasn't really a distribution system that was secure enough for their needs. Microsoft is promising that delivery system, and they are using the fact that they already have WMP installed on millions of machines as the carrot. The stick is that if the companies don't start sharing their content under Microsoft's secure DRM system that end users are likely to beat Hollywood to the punch and start sharing content on their own (like they already do with music). No one else has the comprehensive DRM system that Microsoft has, and certainly no one has anything close to Microsoft's install base.
Real is done, and Apple is done too, they just don't know it yet. In the long run the fight is going to be between Microsoft's DRM-supported formats and unencrypted formats.
You desperately need to take a look at Lindows, my friend. I bought my in-laws one of those Wal-Mart boxes with Lindows on it and they have been very happy with it. I am a fellow Debian user myself, and I tend to *always* edit the config files by hand, but it isn't necessary any more. I was actually surprised by how well Lindows worked as a end user appliance.
Besides, editting config files is not fundamentally any different than editting the registry (aside from the fact that most/etc files have useful comments). The important files get wrapped with a GUI and you are done. For end user systems the amount of files that you need to edit are relatively small. No need to wrap/etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf, for example:).
UNIX isn't any more inherently unfriendly than DOS was, and DOS absolutely cleaned the floor with the early Macintoshes despite the fact that the Macs were much easier to use. The difference a PC running DOS was less expensive than a Mac, and the PC was "good enough" for most folks. Linux provides a heck of a lot of functionality for an extremely low price. For basic computer users who have no desire to tinker with their system Linux makes a perfect turnkey desktop, and for power users Linux's flexibility and wide range of tools is very valuable.
Linux probably isn't there *yet* for the people in the middle, but it gets better every day.
Microsoft's user-friendly advantage is also evaporating rather quickly at this point, and it is only going to get worse. The Sun-sponsored Gnome usability testing is really making a difference. Properly installed Linux is a very useable system, and it comes with a wide array of software all available for free.
I bet that the IDC is right in saying that Linux will pass up Apple by the end of the year on the desktop. This success will only accelerate Linux adoption. With as little as 10% of the desktop market Linux will become an entity that hardware manufacturers and software developers can't afford to overlook.
That isn't the slightest bit true. Natural monopolies might *possibly* behave that way, but it's not likely to work that way for Microsoft.
In reality monopolies are naturally unstable. Especially monopolies that try to gouge their customers. High profit margins in any industry generally generate a pile of smaller leaner companies that are willing to do business for a much smaller profit. Linux is a great example of this.
Despite all that Microsoft has done (and can do) Linux use has grown dramatically every year since it was created. And it will continue to grow until Microsoft lowers its profit margins dramatically.
In the software world it isn't who is the best, or even who has the best marketing. The winner goes to the folks who have the software that is "good enough" at the lowest price. Every day Linux becomes "good enough" for an increasingly large amount of people.
Republicans are definitely for "law and order," but they also tend to believe that the government should let the market decide these sorts of issues.
It's also important to remember that being a monopoly in itself is not illegal. On the contrary, what is illegal are certain actions that are perfectly legal for companies that aren't monopolies. The only way to find out whether your company is a monopoly is to get dragged into court and find out. Because of this the courts generally aren't interested in punishing the monopolist (after all, until they were proven a monopolist they had no way of knowing that their actions weren't just sharp business tactics), but instead they are interested in curbing the monopolists behavior.
The current arrangement between the DOJ and Microsoft could hardly be considered lenient in most cases. However, Judge Jackson ignited the imaginations of Microsoft haters the world over with his proposed breakup remedy. After the breakup remedy was shot down no matter what happened these people were going to cry "foul."
Personally, I am very excited about Linux's chances on the desktop. Linux is going to pass up the Mac OSes this year in marketshare (according to the IDC), and they believe that Linux's desktop market share will double by 2007. I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux do much better than that.
Linux is bringing down the price of software. Especially in the third world. As Microsoft pushes to stamp out piracy Linux will spread even farther. This type of thing doesn't happen overnight. I've been using Linux on my desktop since 1995, and the amount of progress that Linux has made to this point seems pretty amazing to me.
The decision to bring the case against Microsoft was political as well.
You can't hardly blame the Bush administration for choosing a penalty for Microsoft that was more in line with their own economic beliefs. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has far less freedom to do the things that were truly damaging to the industry than they did before. Microsoft is under scrutiny right now, and their business has been regulated. You might not agree with the amount of change that was required of Microsoft, but you can't pretend that things are the same now as they were before the ruling.
And the fact that the hardware market is beginning to break open for Linux is very encouraging. Personally I think that the market would have corrected itself even without the government's help, but that's beside the point. Economies tend to route around monopolies in the same way that TCP/IP networks do. Microsoft's huge profit margins have prompted tons of smaller leaner organizations to target their markets with vastly less expensive offerings.
If the goal is to increase competition in the marketplace then things are lining up nicely. If the goal was to punish Microsoft, then the government has failed (to some extent).
Microsoft wasn't let off, it simply didn't receive the ridiculous death-to-the-company punishment that Microsoft's detractors called for.
Now, I am not Microsoft sympathizer, but I am actually glad things worked out the way that they did. It sets a bad precedent for the government to be able to decide what tools can be included in an operating system. When Linux achieves Total World Domination we aren't going to want the government telling us that Linux distributions can't ship Mozilla because it including a browser is anti-competitive.
In my opinion cutting down on Microsoft's ability to pressure hardware OEMs into toeing the line by threatening to withhold discounts on Windows is the truly important step. Say what you want, Linux is slowly starting to break into the pre-installed hardware market. I got my last desktop system at a discounted price because I didn't want an operating system, and the system I bought before that came with Linux preinstalled (Lindows, but still...). Heck, WalMart.com even sells laptops that come without an operating system (you save about $100 this way).
In short, the market is doing its thing. If you really want to maintain choice in the market make sure your next PC comes with Linux pre-installed (or comes without an OS).
It's easy to be cavalier with someone else's property:), but Sun's StarOffice/OpenOffice investment is likely to pay off in the long run. Not only is it going to force Microsoft to lower their profit margins on MS Office (which Microsoft then uses to assault Sun's position on the server and development fronts), but it is opening up the growing Linux desktop market for Sun. You don't change the status quo on the desktop overnight. Heck, nearly half of all of Microsoft's market share is still using Windows 98. Even Microsoft can't change things quickly in this arena.
All things considered, if the choice is between OpenOffice and Java I would take OpenOffice any day of the week. There are plenty of viable Free Software development environments, but outside of Gnumeric there really aren't Free Software office suite components that compare with OpenOffice.
Come on Bruce, you know that the current licensing scheme can't be making Sun much money. Certainly not much more money that a Dual GPL + something else licensed Java.
Sun's real problem is that a lot of potential allies would rather simply spend their time and energy on some other Free Software languages. For the most part Python, Perl, and Ruby fit the bill well enough, and in a lot of situations these tools have decided advantages over Java. Not to mention the fact that Mono is getting close to being soup as well. Throw in the work being done on gcj + SWT and you have a lot of alternatives to Sun's JVM.
The fact of the matter is that Sun needs the Free Software developer more than we need Sun. They've got very little to lose (their JDK is a free download for crying out loud), and a lot to gain.
I personally see Zope as the Free Software answer to JBoss, and I think that it is pretty darn good answer as well. As an application server Zope is a fairly amazing piece of work. However, it won't run your applications designed to run in a Java application server:). There are a lot of companies that have based their businesses around Java, and Free Software doesn't really have an answer to that. JBoss is a great application server, but it isn't really enterprise business software. It certainly isn't going to replace SAP or Peoplesoft anytime soon. It's barely more than the tools you need to build your own business software. Compiere, on the other hand, is business software, and it is also written in Java (and requires Oracle to boot, argh...).
As for Gnu Enterprise. It's problem is not one of not scaling high enough. It's problem is that it's less than half done. I am convinced that Python (especially with a bit of C for speed) can scale high enough to compete with Java. Especially when you consider the fact that hardware continues to get more and more powerful.
However, Java would fill a very important niche in the set of available Free Software tools. Java is nicely situated between the purely interpretted languages like Python and managing your own memory with C and C++. I am just afraid that Sun will react too slowly to take advantage of their current head start. I have been playing with Mono a bit lately, and it is really impressive.
Why is it that people believe that opening the source code to Java is going to make it less cross-platform. That's ridiculous. Heck, Python and Perl run everywhere. Python is available on far more platforms than Sun's JVM is, and yet nearly all Python and Perl modules operate on all platforms that the interpreter runs. Those few exceptions of module that isn't cross platform are generally modules that only make sense on a specific platform (like COM or Gnome bindings). And guess what, Java has similar libraries use these platform specific bindings right now. People that write code using the Java-Gnome bindings or the SWT-Windows bindings aren't writing portable Java code right this minute. The cat is already out of the bag.
If Java would have been released under a Free Software license then two things would have happened. The first would have been that Microsoft wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole. The only reason that Microsoft dared to create their own GUI classes for Java was that they knew that no matter what happened they weren't going to have to fork over the source code to their changes. And if Microsoft still tried to embrace and extend Java, well the rest of us would have their source code. If the rest of us wanted to use their GUI classes we would simply have to port them to our native GUI o' choice (much like IBM has done with SWT).
Sun has bungled Java from the beginning. The reason that Java never took off on the desktop is that Sun's cross-platform GUI was suboptimal everywhere. Yes, Swing has gotten better, but the bar has been raised in what is expected from a GUI toolkit as well.
Now Sun faces increased pressure from Microsoft in the form of.NET, and they are going to find that a large chunk of Java developers (who happen to do most of their development and deployment on Windows boxes) are interested in.NET's promises. The fact of the matter is that.NET is "good enough" for backend work, and it is a heck of a lot nicer to use for GUI front ends than Java..NET also has a fairly distinct tools advantage. Developers find that they like VS.NET.
Free Software hackers would like to root for Java on this one, but they can't because Java isn't Free. So instead they are spending their time creating Mono or working with Python, Perl, or Ruby.
It's Microsoft that has the history of putting hidden features into their software. Those jokers once put an entire flight simulator in Excel. Push comes to shove I would rather trust the guys working on Debian (out in the open where anyone can participate) than trust the folks at Microsoft. Not to mention the fact that with Free Software I can at least take a peek at the software myself.
It's not the dpkg format or even the apt tools that make Debian so nifty. The thing that makes Debian work is that Debian has put together a formal process for naming, creating dependencies, and testing, so that the packages work together.
The packaging format is just the tip of the iceberg, and people that think that they can solve the many problems with installing software, especially software with complex interdependencies, by slapping some metadata alongside their tarball are simply delusional. apt4rpm wouldn't have helped the RPM based distributions without some sort of centralized repository of RPMs that had been tested together.
The fact that SCO executives continue to talk about this case outside of the court room is prima facie evidence that they aren't really trying to win. Darl's comments to the press have already been used against him in this case. If the Boies lawyers were actually concerned about winning they would have slapped a gag on the SCO executives a long time ago. Every time that Darl or Blake open their mouth to the press they are giving IBM evidence that can be used against them.
Darl's quote about the "millions of lines of code" was used in IBM's "Report on SCO's Compliance With the Court's Order," and another of the documents IBM turned in lately pointed out that SCO publicly announced that HP and Sun were not infringing on their UNIX license, and pointed out that SCO was able to do this without looking at the source to Solaris or HPUX.
It's not about the $780 per desktop. Even Microsoft will happily tell you that the licensing fees are a drop in the ocean. However, there are serious cost issues involved with supporting Windows desktops, and anyone that tells you differently is selling something.
That's especially true of a business (like this one) where a large percentage of the employees are going to be doing customer service. They don't need full fledged desktops. A thin client connecting via X to an application server would be far less expensive and far easier to support. A single Linux server (given enough memory) will happily support over a hundred thin clients if those thin clients are just doing order entry and light office tasks.
Not only does the business save a considerable amount of money on software licensing, but they end up with a architecture that is far less expensive to maintain. Software and hardware upgrades are a snap and maintenance is essentially non-existant. If a monitor or thin client fails you simply replace it. Instead of Windows PC technicians you only need a monkey that can be taught which cords plug in where.
On the other hand, it also is possible to mix in a few Citrix servers for those Windows applications that are needed for specialized desktops, so it shouldn't be that critical if there isn't Linux software for everything.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I have been reading mostly Baen books ever sinced I discovered that I preferred reading on my Visor Handspring and I have been very happy with them. At first I bought their books individually because I didn't want to pay for books I didn't like. Now, however, I just buy the bundles. So far I have enjoyed all of the books (some better than others, granted) and the price is ridiculously low. $15 for 6 books all in the unencrypted format of my choice. That's a deal.
I think that Microsoft and the rest of the console makers would like for that to be the case, but I just don't see it happening. There is a hard core gamer market that is interested, but there is a far larger market that isn't interested in paying for their gaming fix on a monthly basis. It's one thing to get little Timmy a Gamecube game for his birthday, it's another to get him a three month subscription to a game. As long as there is competition in the marketplace it doesn't matter what Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft think. If one of the console makers tries to take advantage of their customers the other console makers will jump in and give the casual gaming market what they want.
Perhaps someday the gaming companies will come up with a service that is so neat that normal people will pay for it on a monthly basis, but they aren't there yet. Microsoft's XBox Live is the closest thing that we currently have to this type of a service and adoption has been ridiculously low despite the fact that Microsoft admits to subsidizing each yearly XBox Live subscription to the tune of about $40. That's not how most folks like to run their businesses.
Microsoft is not really interested in going into the hardware business. They are doing consoles because their core markets aren't going to give them any more growth, but that doesn't mean that they want to try and compete in the PC hardware business with the likes of Dell.
Microsoft is well aware that if they turn the XBox into a PC-killer that Dell will have their own console out on the street the next afternoon (probably running Linux). What's more, where Microsoft lost billions of dollars selling XBox hardware, Dell will almost certainly start turning a profit immediately.
A 512M to 1Gb of flash. That would cost more than a low end hard drive. Think more along the lines of 64M, maybe. Heck, Microsoft is still waffling about whether the thing is going to have 256M or 512M of ram. There is no way they are going to put a half gig of flash memory in this beast.
Microsoft already found out what happens when you sell $400 worth of hardware for $200. They lost several billion dollars with the XBox. The XBox Next is going to be cheap. Microsoft is going to, at worst, break even when they sell you one of those things.
Very well said. I agree completely. Competing in the console market is ridiculously tricky, and you essentially have to gear up for war every few years.
Microsoft's original XBox was a mistake because it was simply too expensive to build. There was no way that Microsoft could charge enough to have break even and still compete with Sony. So Microsoft took a bath on the XBox and hoped they would make it up by selling a pile of games.
This next round Microsoft is going to play it way smarter. Instead of essentially giving away $150 worth of extra hardware with each XBox purchase Microsoft is going build a console that is far less expensive to manufacture. They have also taken great care to make sure that most of the chips are by one vendor. That at least gives them the opportunity to drive down costs via integration over the life of the console. One of the huge problems with the XBox is that the manufacturing costs never really went down. The fact that Microsoft used commodity PC parts with all of the value already squeezed out of them meant that even two years after the XBox release it doesn't really cost any less to make. Microsoft won't make that mistake again. Microsoft is also striking while Sony is more vulnerable. The XBox was released after Sony had already sucked most of the air out of the console market. When the XBox Next is released the PS2 is going to be looking pretty old and tired.
On the downside, however, part of the reason that Microsoft was able to grab so much marketshare was that they gave away an impressive array of hardware. That won't be the case with the XBox Next. Sure, the XBox 2 will be the coolest thing around when it hits the street, but it won't be revolutionary like the XBox was. In fact, in many ways the XBox will almost certainly be a prime competitor. The PS2 (and Gamecube for that matter) have shown that there is more to the console race than pushing polygons. As you pointed out the original XBox will still be an impressive platform with a fairly large marketshare for some time after the XBox 2 comes out. There's a definite chance that gamers and developers won't be interested in another console from Microsoft just yet. Microsoft is going to have to release a pretty compelling set of games at launch time to drive sales.
Any way that you look at it, however, Microsoft is bound to do better financially than they did with the XBox. The XBox was a fiasco. Even if they don't sell any XBox 2s at all they will be better off than they would be if they tried to create another expensive to manufacture XBox.
Hmm... That does make sense. If Microsoft could build in XBox compatibility cheaply enough then they might be more interested in revenue from XBox games than in burning their bridges with XBox developers. However, I disagree that PS2 development was "strong out of the gate." There were more PS1 titles coming out than PS2 titles for quite some time after the PS2 came out. That was fine for Sony, because Sega had stumbled so badly and Nintendo wasn't planning another console for a bit. They could afford to have the PS2 platform look like it was off to a slow start. They were selling games either wey.
The important questions then become, as you pointed out, could the XBox 2 be made compatible with the XBox cheaply, and can Microsoft afford to have the XBox 2 get off to a relatively slow start.
Personally, I don't think that Microsoft can afford either choice.
The problem with this is that console makers aren't really in the market to sell consoles. They are in the market to sell games. They lose money on the console. So when you bought a 7800 to play 2600 games you probably cost Atari money.
The PS2 was simply the first "successful" backwards compatible console, and even that success was mostly because none of their competitors came out with a next gen console at the same time. They could afford to have people buy PS2s to play PS1 games for a bit.
So what are they going to do, come over and break your existing xBox?
Well, the hard drive in your XBox is not likely to last forever...
No on is going to buy a neXtBox simply to play old Xbox games. If someone buys a neXtBox it will be because they want to play new neXtBox games. The ability to play old games will be included if Microsoft feels the development cost is worth the marketability of said feature.
Of course people aren't going to purchase an XBox Next to play the old games. However, if it was backwards compatible many developers would be tempted to continue to target the old XBox so that they could take advantage of the market share of the old XBox. After all, market share for the new XBox is going to be very low at first. Even if it does well it will probably take a couple of years to get to the same point that the XBox is now. Not to mention the fact that the XBox hardware still will have some life left in it when the XBox 2 comes out.
Since new games are critical to the acceptance of a platform Microsoft wants to encourage developers to create new games that require the new console. It's really as simple as that.
Every console manufacturer is guilty of this. I understand that. Heck, I applaud it, as it makes perfect business sense. My point was just that it is ridiculous to think that Microsoft is going to take their VirtualPC software port it from Mac OS X on PPC to whatever the XBox Next runs on and then use that virtualization to run XBox games. Especially considering the fact that the XBox Next probably won't have a hard drive and so they will have to find space for the virtualization software on expensive flash rom or some other solid state technology. Not to mention the fact that the old XBox games presuppose that the XBox has a hard drive.
Yes, Microsoft owns VirtualPC which happens to run on PPC chips. But it is just stupid to add the fact that Microsoft owns VirtualPC to the fact that the XBox Next is going to be running a PPC chip and come up with some sort of backwards compatibility for XBox games. You might as well say that 1 + 1 = 3 (which it does for exceptionally large values of 1).
I am not being disrespectful of Microsoft. I am disrespecting the XBox fanboys that think that Microsoft is going to try and preserve their investment in the XBox platform. I personally think that it makes good economic sense to come out with an incompatible XBox Next. Especially considering the fact that making the XBox Next compatible with the XBox would mean that they would have to perpetuate the design choices that made the XBox such an economic disaster for their company. Microsoft isn't going to be able to compete with Sony if they continue to create consoles that cost so much more to make than Sony's do. For now, that means pulling out the hard drive, and trying to use chips that they can combine over the life of the console.
No, backwards compatiblity will make you buy more games. You guys sometimes really love to forget things, like the Xbox's ability to system link. I would go buy ANOTHER copy of Halo just so I could play it system link with my old Xbox and my new one.
Ah, perfect. That's precisely what Microsoft wants you to do. They'll be so happy when you pick up another copy of Halo (out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart probably) instead of purchasing a new game that is available for the XBox Next ssystem.
The fact of the matter, my anonymous friend, is that not all sales are created equal. After the XBox Next comes out Microsoft is not going to want you to purchase a copy of Halo, or any other XBox game. They will want to convince developers and retailers that the future is XBox Next. If XBox games sales stay higher than XBox Next games for very long then developers might well decide that consumers aren't interested in the next Microsoft console and are instead sticking with the XBox.
The fact that the PS2 was backwards compatible meant that for quite a while after the PS2 came out PS1 games were still being actively developed. Sony isn't making that mistake again, and Microsoft isn't going to make that mistake either.
You guys really forget alot of stuff when it comes to Microsoft. You might not like them, but that does not change many many basic facts about the Xbox that you choose to ignore.
No, XBox fanboys simply can't face the facts. The XBox has probably been Microsoft's largest failure to date. They have lost billions on the XBox, and so now they are changing the way they play the game. That's actually good for the future of the XBox. In order to make money in the console industry Microsoft has to learn from those companies that actually make money.
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The reason that Microsoft suggested that they bundle competing products with Windows is that Microsoft knows that there is more to winning the streaming media contest than simply having your software installed.
Right now, as we speak, Microsoft is busing lining up all of the large content providers and selling them on using Windows Media Player as the the new distribution medium for their content. Hollywood and her allies are dying for a way that they can use the Internet to distribute their media, but up until recently there wasn't really a distribution system that was secure enough for their needs. Microsoft is promising that delivery system, and they are using the fact that they already have WMP installed on millions of machines as the carrot. The stick is that if the companies don't start sharing their content under Microsoft's secure DRM system that end users are likely to beat Hollywood to the punch and start sharing content on their own (like they already do with music). No one else has the comprehensive DRM system that Microsoft has, and certainly no one has anything close to Microsoft's install base.
Real is done, and Apple is done too, they just don't know it yet. In the long run the fight is going to be between Microsoft's DRM-supported formats and unencrypted formats.
You desperately need to take a look at Lindows, my friend. I bought my in-laws one of those Wal-Mart boxes with Lindows on it and they have been very happy with it. I am a fellow Debian user myself, and I tend to *always* edit the config files by hand, but it isn't necessary any more. I was actually surprised by how well Lindows worked as a end user appliance.
Besides, editting config files is not fundamentally any different than editting the registry (aside from the fact that most /etc files have useful comments). The important files get wrapped with a GUI and you are done. For end user systems the amount of files that you need to edit are relatively small. No need to wrap /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf, for example :).
UNIX isn't any more inherently unfriendly than DOS was, and DOS absolutely cleaned the floor with the early Macintoshes despite the fact that the Macs were much easier to use. The difference a PC running DOS was less expensive than a Mac, and the PC was "good enough" for most folks. Linux provides a heck of a lot of functionality for an extremely low price. For basic computer users who have no desire to tinker with their system Linux makes a perfect turnkey desktop, and for power users Linux's flexibility and wide range of tools is very valuable.
Linux probably isn't there *yet* for the people in the middle, but it gets better every day.
Microsoft's user-friendly advantage is also evaporating rather quickly at this point, and it is only going to get worse. The Sun-sponsored Gnome usability testing is really making a difference. Properly installed Linux is a very useable system, and it comes with a wide array of software all available for free.
I bet that the IDC is right in saying that Linux will pass up Apple by the end of the year on the desktop. This success will only accelerate Linux adoption. With as little as 10% of the desktop market Linux will become an entity that hardware manufacturers and software developers can't afford to overlook.
That isn't the slightest bit true. Natural monopolies might *possibly* behave that way, but it's not likely to work that way for Microsoft.
In reality monopolies are naturally unstable. Especially monopolies that try to gouge their customers. High profit margins in any industry generally generate a pile of smaller leaner companies that are willing to do business for a much smaller profit. Linux is a great example of this.
Despite all that Microsoft has done (and can do) Linux use has grown dramatically every year since it was created. And it will continue to grow until Microsoft lowers its profit margins dramatically.
In the software world it isn't who is the best, or even who has the best marketing. The winner goes to the folks who have the software that is "good enough" at the lowest price. Every day Linux becomes "good enough" for an increasingly large amount of people.
Republicans are definitely for "law and order," but they also tend to believe that the government should let the market decide these sorts of issues.
It's also important to remember that being a monopoly in itself is not illegal. On the contrary, what is illegal are certain actions that are perfectly legal for companies that aren't monopolies. The only way to find out whether your company is a monopoly is to get dragged into court and find out. Because of this the courts generally aren't interested in punishing the monopolist (after all, until they were proven a monopolist they had no way of knowing that their actions weren't just sharp business tactics), but instead they are interested in curbing the monopolists behavior.
The current arrangement between the DOJ and Microsoft could hardly be considered lenient in most cases. However, Judge Jackson ignited the imaginations of Microsoft haters the world over with his proposed breakup remedy. After the breakup remedy was shot down no matter what happened these people were going to cry "foul."
Personally, I am very excited about Linux's chances on the desktop. Linux is going to pass up the Mac OSes this year in marketshare (according to the IDC), and they believe that Linux's desktop market share will double by 2007. I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux do much better than that.
Linux is bringing down the price of software. Especially in the third world. As Microsoft pushes to stamp out piracy Linux will spread even farther. This type of thing doesn't happen overnight. I've been using Linux on my desktop since 1995, and the amount of progress that Linux has made to this point seems pretty amazing to me.
The decision to bring the case against Microsoft was political as well.
You can't hardly blame the Bush administration for choosing a penalty for Microsoft that was more in line with their own economic beliefs. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has far less freedom to do the things that were truly damaging to the industry than they did before. Microsoft is under scrutiny right now, and their business has been regulated. You might not agree with the amount of change that was required of Microsoft, but you can't pretend that things are the same now as they were before the ruling.
And the fact that the hardware market is beginning to break open for Linux is very encouraging. Personally I think that the market would have corrected itself even without the government's help, but that's beside the point. Economies tend to route around monopolies in the same way that TCP/IP networks do. Microsoft's huge profit margins have prompted tons of smaller leaner organizations to target their markets with vastly less expensive offerings.
If the goal is to increase competition in the marketplace then things are lining up nicely. If the goal was to punish Microsoft, then the government has failed (to some extent).
Microsoft wasn't let off, it simply didn't receive the ridiculous death-to-the-company punishment that Microsoft's detractors called for.
Now, I am not Microsoft sympathizer, but I am actually glad things worked out the way that they did. It sets a bad precedent for the government to be able to decide what tools can be included in an operating system. When Linux achieves Total World Domination we aren't going to want the government telling us that Linux distributions can't ship Mozilla because it including a browser is anti-competitive.
In my opinion cutting down on Microsoft's ability to pressure hardware OEMs into toeing the line by threatening to withhold discounts on Windows is the truly important step. Say what you want, Linux is slowly starting to break into the pre-installed hardware market. I got my last desktop system at a discounted price because I didn't want an operating system, and the system I bought before that came with Linux preinstalled (Lindows, but still...). Heck, WalMart.com even sells laptops that come without an operating system (you save about $100 this way).
In short, the market is doing its thing. If you really want to maintain choice in the market make sure your next PC comes with Linux pre-installed (or comes without an OS).
It's easy to be cavalier with someone else's property :), but Sun's StarOffice/OpenOffice investment is likely to pay off in the long run. Not only is it going to force Microsoft to lower their profit margins on MS Office (which Microsoft then uses to assault Sun's position on the server and development fronts), but it is opening up the growing Linux desktop market for Sun. You don't change the status quo on the desktop overnight. Heck, nearly half of all of Microsoft's market share is still using Windows 98. Even Microsoft can't change things quickly in this arena.
All things considered, if the choice is between OpenOffice and Java I would take OpenOffice any day of the week. There are plenty of viable Free Software development environments, but outside of Gnumeric there really aren't Free Software office suite components that compare with OpenOffice.
Come on Bruce, you know that the current licensing scheme can't be making Sun much money. Certainly not much more money that a Dual GPL + something else licensed Java.
Sun's real problem is that a lot of potential allies would rather simply spend their time and energy on some other Free Software languages. For the most part Python, Perl, and Ruby fit the bill well enough, and in a lot of situations these tools have decided advantages over Java. Not to mention the fact that Mono is getting close to being soup as well. Throw in the work being done on gcj + SWT and you have a lot of alternatives to Sun's JVM.
The fact of the matter is that Sun needs the Free Software developer more than we need Sun. They've got very little to lose (their JDK is a free download for crying out loud), and a lot to gain.
I personally see Zope as the Free Software answer to JBoss, and I think that it is pretty darn good answer as well. As an application server Zope is a fairly amazing piece of work. However, it won't run your applications designed to run in a Java application server :). There are a lot of companies that have based their businesses around Java, and Free Software doesn't really have an answer to that. JBoss is a great application server, but it isn't really enterprise business software. It certainly isn't going to replace SAP or Peoplesoft anytime soon. It's barely more than the tools you need to build your own business software. Compiere, on the other hand, is business software, and it is also written in Java (and requires Oracle to boot, argh...).
As for Gnu Enterprise. It's problem is not one of not scaling high enough. It's problem is that it's less than half done. I am convinced that Python (especially with a bit of C for speed) can scale high enough to compete with Java. Especially when you consider the fact that hardware continues to get more and more powerful.
However, Java would fill a very important niche in the set of available Free Software tools. Java is nicely situated between the purely interpretted languages like Python and managing your own memory with C and C++. I am just afraid that Sun will react too slowly to take advantage of their current head start. I have been playing with Mono a bit lately, and it is really impressive.
Why is it that people believe that opening the source code to Java is going to make it less cross-platform. That's ridiculous. Heck, Python and Perl run everywhere. Python is available on far more platforms than Sun's JVM is, and yet nearly all Python and Perl modules operate on all platforms that the interpreter runs. Those few exceptions of module that isn't cross platform are generally modules that only make sense on a specific platform (like COM or Gnome bindings). And guess what, Java has similar libraries use these platform specific bindings right now. People that write code using the Java-Gnome bindings or the SWT-Windows bindings aren't writing portable Java code right this minute. The cat is already out of the bag.
If Java would have been released under a Free Software license then two things would have happened. The first would have been that Microsoft wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole. The only reason that Microsoft dared to create their own GUI classes for Java was that they knew that no matter what happened they weren't going to have to fork over the source code to their changes. And if Microsoft still tried to embrace and extend Java, well the rest of us would have their source code. If the rest of us wanted to use their GUI classes we would simply have to port them to our native GUI o' choice (much like IBM has done with SWT).
Sun has bungled Java from the beginning. The reason that Java never took off on the desktop is that Sun's cross-platform GUI was suboptimal everywhere. Yes, Swing has gotten better, but the bar has been raised in what is expected from a GUI toolkit as well.
Now Sun faces increased pressure from Microsoft in the form of .NET, and they are going to find that a large chunk of Java developers (who happen to do most of their development and deployment on Windows boxes) are interested in .NET's promises. The fact of the matter is that .NET is "good enough" for backend work, and it is a heck of a lot nicer to use for GUI front ends than Java. .NET also has a fairly distinct tools advantage. Developers find that they like VS.NET.
Free Software hackers would like to root for Java on this one, but they can't because Java isn't Free. So instead they are spending their time creating Mono or working with Python, Perl, or Ruby.
It's Microsoft that has the history of putting hidden features into their software. Those jokers once put an entire flight simulator in Excel. Push comes to shove I would rather trust the guys working on Debian (out in the open where anyone can participate) than trust the folks at Microsoft. Not to mention the fact that with Free Software I can at least take a peek at the software myself.
It's not the dpkg format or even the apt tools that make Debian so nifty. The thing that makes Debian work is that Debian has put together a formal process for naming, creating dependencies, and testing, so that the packages work together.
The packaging format is just the tip of the iceberg, and people that think that they can solve the many problems with installing software, especially software with complex interdependencies, by slapping some metadata alongside their tarball are simply delusional. apt4rpm wouldn't have helped the RPM based distributions without some sort of centralized repository of RPMs that had been tested together.
The fact that SCO executives continue to talk about this case outside of the court room is prima facie evidence that they aren't really trying to win. Darl's comments to the press have already been used against him in this case. If the Boies lawyers were actually concerned about winning they would have slapped a gag on the SCO executives a long time ago. Every time that Darl or Blake open their mouth to the press they are giving IBM evidence that can be used against them.
Darl's quote about the "millions of lines of code" was used in IBM's "Report on SCO's Compliance With the Court's Order," and another of the documents IBM turned in lately pointed out that SCO publicly announced that HP and Sun were not infringing on their UNIX license, and pointed out that SCO was able to do this without looking at the source to Solaris or HPUX.
It's not about the $780 per desktop. Even Microsoft will happily tell you that the licensing fees are a drop in the ocean. However, there are serious cost issues involved with supporting Windows desktops, and anyone that tells you differently is selling something.
That's especially true of a business (like this one) where a large percentage of the employees are going to be doing customer service. They don't need full fledged desktops. A thin client connecting via X to an application server would be far less expensive and far easier to support. A single Linux server (given enough memory) will happily support over a hundred thin clients if those thin clients are just doing order entry and light office tasks.
Not only does the business save a considerable amount of money on software licensing, but they end up with a architecture that is far less expensive to maintain. Software and hardware upgrades are a snap and maintenance is essentially non-existant. If a monitor or thin client fails you simply replace it. Instead of Windows PC technicians you only need a monkey that can be taught which cords plug in where.
On the other hand, it also is possible to mix in a few Citrix servers for those Windows applications that are needed for specialized desktops, so it shouldn't be that critical if there isn't Linux software for everything.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I have been reading mostly Baen books ever sinced I discovered that I preferred reading on my Visor Handspring and I have been very happy with them. At first I bought their books individually because I didn't want to pay for books I didn't like. Now, however, I just buy the bundles. So far I have enjoyed all of the books (some better than others, granted) and the price is ridiculously low. $15 for 6 books all in the unencrypted format of my choice. That's a deal.
I think that Microsoft and the rest of the console makers would like for that to be the case, but I just don't see it happening. There is a hard core gamer market that is interested, but there is a far larger market that isn't interested in paying for their gaming fix on a monthly basis. It's one thing to get little Timmy a Gamecube game for his birthday, it's another to get him a three month subscription to a game. As long as there is competition in the marketplace it doesn't matter what Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft think. If one of the console makers tries to take advantage of their customers the other console makers will jump in and give the casual gaming market what they want.
Perhaps someday the gaming companies will come up with a service that is so neat that normal people will pay for it on a monthly basis, but they aren't there yet. Microsoft's XBox Live is the closest thing that we currently have to this type of a service and adoption has been ridiculously low despite the fact that Microsoft admits to subsidizing each yearly XBox Live subscription to the tune of about $40. That's not how most folks like to run their businesses.
Microsoft is not really interested in going into the hardware business. They are doing consoles because their core markets aren't going to give them any more growth, but that doesn't mean that they want to try and compete in the PC hardware business with the likes of Dell.
Microsoft is well aware that if they turn the XBox into a PC-killer that Dell will have their own console out on the street the next afternoon (probably running Linux). What's more, where Microsoft lost billions of dollars selling XBox hardware, Dell will almost certainly start turning a profit immediately.
A 512M to 1Gb of flash. That would cost more than a low end hard drive. Think more along the lines of 64M, maybe. Heck, Microsoft is still waffling about whether the thing is going to have 256M or 512M of ram. There is no way they are going to put a half gig of flash memory in this beast.
Microsoft already found out what happens when you sell $400 worth of hardware for $200. They lost several billion dollars with the XBox. The XBox Next is going to be cheap. Microsoft is going to, at worst, break even when they sell you one of those things.
Thanks for playing.
Very well said. I agree completely. Competing in the console market is ridiculously tricky, and you essentially have to gear up for war every few years.
Microsoft's original XBox was a mistake because it was simply too expensive to build. There was no way that Microsoft could charge enough to have break even and still compete with Sony. So Microsoft took a bath on the XBox and hoped they would make it up by selling a pile of games.
This next round Microsoft is going to play it way smarter. Instead of essentially giving away $150 worth of extra hardware with each XBox purchase Microsoft is going build a console that is far less expensive to manufacture. They have also taken great care to make sure that most of the chips are by one vendor. That at least gives them the opportunity to drive down costs via integration over the life of the console. One of the huge problems with the XBox is that the manufacturing costs never really went down. The fact that Microsoft used commodity PC parts with all of the value already squeezed out of them meant that even two years after the XBox release it doesn't really cost any less to make. Microsoft won't make that mistake again. Microsoft is also striking while Sony is more vulnerable. The XBox was released after Sony had already sucked most of the air out of the console market. When the XBox Next is released the PS2 is going to be looking pretty old and tired.
On the downside, however, part of the reason that Microsoft was able to grab so much marketshare was that they gave away an impressive array of hardware. That won't be the case with the XBox Next. Sure, the XBox 2 will be the coolest thing around when it hits the street, but it won't be revolutionary like the XBox was. In fact, in many ways the XBox will almost certainly be a prime competitor. The PS2 (and Gamecube for that matter) have shown that there is more to the console race than pushing polygons. As you pointed out the original XBox will still be an impressive platform with a fairly large marketshare for some time after the XBox 2 comes out. There's a definite chance that gamers and developers won't be interested in another console from Microsoft just yet. Microsoft is going to have to release a pretty compelling set of games at launch time to drive sales.
Any way that you look at it, however, Microsoft is bound to do better financially than they did with the XBox. The XBox was a fiasco. Even if they don't sell any XBox 2s at all they will be better off than they would be if they tried to create another expensive to manufacture XBox.
Hmm... That does make sense. If Microsoft could build in XBox compatibility cheaply enough then they might be more interested in revenue from XBox games than in burning their bridges with XBox developers. However, I disagree that PS2 development was "strong out of the gate." There were more PS1 titles coming out than PS2 titles for quite some time after the PS2 came out. That was fine for Sony, because Sega had stumbled so badly and Nintendo wasn't planning another console for a bit. They could afford to have the PS2 platform look like it was off to a slow start. They were selling games either wey.
The important questions then become, as you pointed out, could the XBox 2 be made compatible with the XBox cheaply, and can Microsoft afford to have the XBox 2 get off to a relatively slow start.
Personally, I don't think that Microsoft can afford either choice.
The problem with this is that console makers aren't really in the market to sell consoles. They are in the market to sell games. They lose money on the console. So when you bought a 7800 to play 2600 games you probably cost Atari money.
The PS2 was simply the first "successful" backwards compatible console, and even that success was mostly because none of their competitors came out with a next gen console at the same time. They could afford to have people buy PS2s to play PS1 games for a bit.
Well, the hard drive in your XBox is not likely to last forever...
Of course people aren't going to purchase an XBox Next to play the old games. However, if it was backwards compatible many developers would be tempted to continue to target the old XBox so that they could take advantage of the market share of the old XBox. After all, market share for the new XBox is going to be very low at first. Even if it does well it will probably take a couple of years to get to the same point that the XBox is now. Not to mention the fact that the XBox hardware still will have some life left in it when the XBox 2 comes out.
Since new games are critical to the acceptance of a platform Microsoft wants to encourage developers to create new games that require the new console. It's really as simple as that.
Every console manufacturer is guilty of this. I understand that. Heck, I applaud it, as it makes perfect business sense. My point was just that it is ridiculous to think that Microsoft is going to take their VirtualPC software port it from Mac OS X on PPC to whatever the XBox Next runs on and then use that virtualization to run XBox games. Especially considering the fact that the XBox Next probably won't have a hard drive and so they will have to find space for the virtualization software on expensive flash rom or some other solid state technology. Not to mention the fact that the old XBox games presuppose that the XBox has a hard drive.
Yes, Microsoft owns VirtualPC which happens to run on PPC chips. But it is just stupid to add the fact that Microsoft owns VirtualPC to the fact that the XBox Next is going to be running a PPC chip and come up with some sort of backwards compatibility for XBox games. You might as well say that 1 + 1 = 3 (which it does for exceptionally large values of 1).
I am not being disrespectful of Microsoft. I am disrespecting the XBox fanboys that think that Microsoft is going to try and preserve their investment in the XBox platform. I personally think that it makes good economic sense to come out with an incompatible XBox Next. Especially considering the fact that making the XBox Next compatible with the XBox would mean that they would have to perpetuate the design choices that made the XBox such an economic disaster for their company. Microsoft isn't going to be able to compete with Sony if they continue to create consoles that cost so much more to make than Sony's do. For now, that means pulling out the hard drive, and trying to use chips that they can combine over the life of the console.
Ah, perfect. That's precisely what Microsoft wants you to do. They'll be so happy when you pick up another copy of Halo (out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart probably) instead of purchasing a new game that is available for the XBox Next ssystem.
The fact of the matter, my anonymous friend, is that not all sales are created equal. After the XBox Next comes out Microsoft is not going to want you to purchase a copy of Halo, or any other XBox game. They will want to convince developers and retailers that the future is XBox Next. If XBox games sales stay higher than XBox Next games for very long then developers might well decide that consumers aren't interested in the next Microsoft console and are instead sticking with the XBox.
The fact that the PS2 was backwards compatible meant that for quite a while after the PS2 came out PS1 games were still being actively developed. Sony isn't making that mistake again, and Microsoft isn't going to make that mistake either.
No, XBox fanboys simply can't face the facts. The XBox has probably been Microsoft's largest failure to date. They have lost billions on the XBox, and so now they are changing the way they play the game. That's actually good for the future of the XBox. In order to make money in the console industry Microsoft has to learn from those companies that actually make money.